A man without a past, the torturer hero of The Inquisitor named himself Geiger after Swiss surrealist HR Giger, adding an E "for visual symmetry". Now he runs a business, Information Retrieval, which plays to his talent for recognising a lie the way Toscanini could tell that a single string on a single violin in a whole orchestra was out of tune. He has three rules, one of which is that he will not use his unorthodox methods on children. But then one of his clients brings in a young boy, 12-year-old Ezra … The danger with a "strong" protagonist is that he overpowers the plot. Smith understands this, giving him enough human qualities to offset his blank ruthlessness and us occasional insights into Geiger's damaged brain via the flashbacks that accompany his migraines. The result is one of the most original debut thrillers since SJ Watson's Before I Go To Sleep.

The Blue Death, by Joan Brady (Simon & Schuster, £19.99)There are shades of Chinatownand Bonfire of the Vanities about Brady's third thriller, set in the US political hub of Springfield, Illinois. We are whisked from the manicured lawns of the ruling elite to the cells of South Hams state correctional facility. Once an inmate at that grim institution, David Marion is about to marry into the Freyl family, much to the distaste of snobbish matriarch Becky. What has he to do with the corrupt mayor's plan to privatise Springfield's water supply? And what had scientist Aloysia Gonzaga discovered that led to her murder at psychopathic David's hands in the novel's opening pages? The Blue Death is sharp and fierce and clever, full of horrid little details and appalled by the arrogance of domination and the weakness of submission. Impressive.

Harriet, by Elizabeth Jenkins (Persephone, £12)Jenkins, who died in 2010 aged 104, remains best known for her perceptive account of an unhappy marriage, The Tortoise and the Hare. But Harriet, published in 1934 and reissued here with an afterword by Rachel Cooke, was her first commercial success. It's what we would now call "novelised true crime": an account of a 1877 murder, the Penge mystery, where a young woman with learning difficulties was locked away by relatives in the bedroom of a country house and starved to death. Harriet works wonderfully as a gothic thriller, Jenkins's Austenian attention to social detail creating an involving sense of verisimilitude. In fact, the novel has been read as a warped riff on Emma, with Harriet Woodhouse a stand-in for that novel's innocent simpleton Harriet Smith. Jenkins suggests rather than shows the worst of what is being done to Harriet, and it's this that makes the book so unsettling.

The Survivor, by Gregg Hurwitz (Sphere, £7.99)Hurwitz's fifth thriller is the tale of Nate Overbay – an anagram, surely? - who is about to jump from the ledge of an LA high-rise when the bank behind him is raided by masked gunmen. On a whim, he puts his army training to good use and intervenes. But while he is feted as a hero for his spontaneous daring, it looks as though he picked the wrong heist to thwart. The set-up is neat, ditto the idea of an action hero who is suicidal and therefore unafraid of death. Much of The Survivor is routine, but Hurwitz writes a good deal more elegantly than the genre demands, and the back-story of Nate's failed marriage and dysfunctional relationship with his daughter is nimbly handled.